Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(96)

The same reporter asked about a double murder in Virginia, and again, the demurral, that said nothing but Yes, we have it all . . .

Dunn went to bed at one o’clock in the morning, long past his usual bedtime. He didn’t sleep—he thought he didn’t sleep—but he did get a visit from Rachel Stokes.



* * *



—

SHE WAS DRESSED as she was the night he killed her; she seemed to be alive, but there was a bullet hole in her forehead that gaped open like a third eye. He’d also shot her in the jaw, but that didn’t keep her from talking, although the bottom half of her chin and her throat were seeping blood, the same coppery smell left by the two deer.

“You killed me for nothing,” she said. “I had a good life, I was a good woman, and you killed me for nothing because you are a fool.”

“I’m not a fool,” he said, the dread gripping his heart and squeezing.

“You’re a fool and you always were a fool. I thought I might like you and you shot me and you shot me again and you killed my brother, for nothing, for a miserable little tramp who wanted to be on TV. There was never any plan, there was never any 1919, it was all about a teenager trying to get on television.”

“I’m dreaming.”

“You’re not dreaming. You’re living this. You’re wide awake, Elias. I came back with a message for you. You’re bound for hell, Elias.”

“I don’t believe in that shit,” Dunn shouted. “Go away, go away.”

“You say you don’t believe in it, but you do, Elias. You felt that hell-bound prickle when you sat in the graveyard, shooting that little boy. You felt that prickle in your arm hairs, that cemetery tickle/prickle. The one that tells you there is a hell, and that you will burn there, all for being a fool . . .”

He may have been dreaming and he may have been hallucinating; at five o’clock in the morning he put his feet on the bedroom floor, rubbed his head, and when he leaned back, and put one hand on the sheets, he found it soaked with sweat, but smelling of blood. He staggered away from the bed, into the bathroom, where he stared at himself in the mirror. His face seemed narrower than it usually did, drawn, white as paper; dry, not sweaty. He felt weak, as though he might have sweated out every drop of fluid in his body.

He went down the stairs, got a bottle of berry-flavored vitamin water from the refrigerator, gulped it down, some of it slopping down onto his T-shirt. Turned on the television, searched the news channels, but nobody was talking about Audrey Coil at five o’clock on a Sunday morning.

He turned the television off, sat down, stared at the blank screen. The feds had the gun. They had apparently found the Stokeses. If they looked at all the people who worked with Randy Stokes, they’d come to him. If they got DNA off the rifle, if they found his DNA from the accidental gunshot wound at the Stokeses’ place . . . they’d get to him.

He wouldn’t just be a fool to some psychological twitch called Rachel Stokes, he’d be a nationwide fool. He’d be renowned as a fool.



* * *



—

NOW RACHEL STOKES climbed back inside his head: “You’re a fool. A fool. A foooool . . .”

He shook her off, went back to the computer, the New York Times, the Washington Post. Long stories there, Senator Coil out of touch, but they had printed versions of Audrey Coil’s television interviews before she’d been apparently turned off by a family lawyer. Exterior shots of the house.

He kicked back from the computer, then leaned into it again. A Google search turned up an address, and a street view showed the same house as he’d seen on television. The satellite pinpointed it, a sprawling, single-story bricks-and-boards place with a barn in back that was larger than the house; and a bright blue swimming pool tucked out of sight in the heavily landscaped lawn.

Audrey Coil had done this to him: made him into a fool. He paced through the house, hating on it. The girl’s image was a tick in his brain, with Rachel Stokes there as well, taunting him.

He put both hands over his ears, staggered back up the stairs to the bedroom, fell on the bed.

He never passed out. He couldn’t. He hoped for it, some sort of darkness, oblivion. He got Rachel Stokes, with a bullet hole, sneering . . .



* * *



—

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK Sunday morning, back at the computer, on Google Maps, eleven hours, twenty minutes from door to door, Warrenton, Virginia, to Tifton, Georgia. He paced some more, thinking about it, but he was never in doubt.

He loaded his cabin gear into his truck—never could tell what you might need on the road—along with the new rifle and the carry pistol, ammo, three days’ clothes, his dopp kit. He got gas, donuts, and coffee at a Sunoco station, and headed out of town, down the highway to I-95, the right turn onto the freeway and nothing ahead but Tifton, Georgia, a little less than twelve hours away.

This was the only road to redemption, the only way to erase the insult.



* * *



—

RACHEL STOKES RODE WITH HIM, in the passenger seat, now silent, but always looming. He was afraid to look at her, the mutilated head, the sunken eyes with their blackening flesh around the sockets, the smell of blood suffusing the truck.

Dunn put his head down and pushed south.

Sunday morning, coming down.